as these wicked animals were guilty of on the fair face of old England,
should live in history only as an invertebrate, a royal failure, a
decayed mollusk, and the dropsical head of a tottering dynasty.

In order to strengthen his feeble forces, Ethelred allied himself, in
1001, to Richard II., Duke of Normandy, and married his daughter Emma,
but the Danes continued to make night hideous and elope with ladies whom
they had never met before. It was a sad time in the history of England,
and poor Emma wept many a hot and bitter tear as she yielded one jewel
after another to the pawnbroker in order to buy off the coarse and
hateful Danes.

If Ethelred were to know how he is regarded by the historian who pens
these lines, he would kick the foot-board out of his casket, and bite
himself severely in four places.

To add to his foul history, happening to have a few inoffensive Danes on
hand, on the 13th of November, the festival of St. Brice, 1002, he gave
it out that he would massacre these people, among them the sister of the
Danish king, a noble woman who had become a Christian (only it is to be
hoped a better one), and married an English earl. He had them all
butchered.

[Illustration: ETHELRED WEDS EMMA.]

In 1003, Sweyn, with revenge in his heart, began a war of extermination
or subjugation, and never yielded till he was, in fact, king of England,
while the royal intellectual polyp, known as Ethelred the Unwholesome,
fled to Normandy, in the 1013th year Anno Domini.